mising a period of fair weather. It gave us, also, the
advantage of greater freedom in noises; for, when living in the wild,
one comes to realize how potent a carrier, or muffler, of noises is the
wind. A fire at night, or smoke by day, may be tempered with human
ingenuity, but nature bandies the sound waves with her breath.

I dined in the elegance of simplicity, and Smilax extinguished our small
fire of buttonwood. Leaning my back against a stalwart pine, I watched
the shadows stealing through our avenue of trees. Somewhere above my
head a whistling owl, one of those lovable little feathered cavaliers
that showers his mate with unstinted adulation, fluttered and courted.
Later the mournful call of a whooping crane floated across the prairie.

I heard these things in a lazy, contented way, but my thoughts were on
another island--a real island surrounded by water, where waves lapped
the beach and two eyes, that had given color to the iris, watched for
deliverance. Then with a jerk I sat up. Smilax had turned his head to
listen, and in his attitude dwelt a note of agitation.

"What is it?" I whispered; for surely I had heard a sound that did not
belong to these creatures living in the forest about us.

He raised his hand to caution silence. Then came the sound again,
slowly: one--two--three--four--

"Axe," he said, his eyes shining as beads and his finger pointing into
the southwest from where the breeze was coming. "You wait; me go see."

"I'll go, too," I announced.

"No; maybe make too much noise. Smilax go."

"Who d'you suppose it is that close to us?" I excitedly asked. "Not
them, surely?"

He looked at me with grave eyes and answered:

"No can say; maybe hunters find way in here. You smoke; me go see."

Yet his sudden gravity left little doubt in my mind of what, at least,
he suspected; for he well knew that hunters did not find their way into
this unsurveyed wilderness! Then, too, there was something in the
stillness of the night that seemed to portend great things. The leaves
transmitted their restlessness to my yawning nerves, as iron dust
springs to a magnet.

Intending to wave good luck as he melted into the darkness, without
being observed I walked silently behind him to the prairie's edge; but
there he stopped, opened his arms, raised his face to the sky, standing
motionless. And a great peace came over me, for I saw that, in the
simple way of the old-time Seminoles who invariably turned to thei